Seasons of Lace

I hope you all had a great weekend while I was frolicking about with my family on a bit of a sneak long weekend.

It’s great to see these prize winners posts of their goodies — especially the ones that I haven’t seen in person yet.

Meanwhile, we have the voting in from all but one of our judges, so I’m hoping that we can announce Judged Competition winners soon.

In the interim…I think it’s about time for Round Two of the Raffles, except that I do want to explain how we’re doing this, because not all of the events will have multiple rounds of prizes. You may have noticed that for each of the first round raffles, I identified how many “entries” there were (posts that qualified as entries either designated that something was cast on, or finished), and how many knitters there were. We decided that for categories with fewer than ten players, we’d do a single raffle; for those with between 10 and 17 players, we’d run two rounds of raffles; for those with 18- 25 players we’d do three rounds, and the one with over 30 players would get a fourth raffle. We considered doing 1-10, 11-20, 21-30, and 30+, but one category with 18 knitters had over 50 entries… and we just “had” to reward that.

So, for Round Two, we have some duplicate prizes, sort of.  The second round Raffle Prize For Newbie Lace Knitters, and for Small Lace is a KnitPicks Lace sampler.   We have two colors left — and our winners will get to choose!  There’s one sampler pack in “Sea View” (blues), and two in “Sunset Picnic”.  Whichever winner contacts me first gets first choice.

And our Newbie prize winner is……… Melfina!! who will also be enjoying a $10.00 gift certificate from

And our Small Lace prize winner is ……. nolaboard!, who will also be receiving a Hearts & Hugs sock pattern from JoyKnits

Congratulations!

But wait… that’s not all!!!

We also have another gorgeous shawl pin  from Designs by Romi to raffle off for the Second Round prize in Self Designed Lace!

thislittlepiggyknits will be receiving this pin as soon as Romi can arrange it!  She’ll also be receiving a sock pattern from the Knit Foundry

And finally ( … well, for today anyway)

We’ve raffled off another $25.00 Gift certificate from

as the Second Round Raffle Prize for Wee Lace

alittlefuzzy will be receiving this… and will enjoy free shipping on her goodies if she’s in the U.S.!  She also has a $10.00 gift certificate from KnitSpot

Tomorrow??

More Round Two Raffle Prizes!!!

My Newbie Lace Knitter prize arrived this week!  It’s the DVD “Knitting Lace with Meg Swansen”.  I haven’t had time to watch it yet, but I did look at the charts.  I really like the neck-scarf version of a Faroese shawl, and I think that will probably be my first project from the DVD.

I have also joined a KAL on Ravelry.  We are going to be making the Fan Stitch Half Circle Shawl from Martha Waterman’s Traditional Knitted Lace Shawls.  I still need to find yarn for the project.  So I fully intend to continue my lace knitting efforts, and I look forward to joining you all again for “Winter of Lace”.  And to the moderators, thank you again for this wonderful KAL!

A quick review…

Last week we awarded prizes for the Quantity Competitions (nolaboard knit the most small items, thislitlepiggyknits knit the most yards).

This week, we’re hoping to submit things to our Judges (but would really really really like to see some more nominations!).  We plan to send the lists to them tomorrow — so you have one more day to nominate something for one or more of the judged competitions.  We’re also hoping to get a nice set for the Viewers’ Choice Award, but need more nominations before we invite you to vote (hint hint).

While we wait for the judges, we thought we’d fire up the Random Number Generator and award some Raffle Prizes.

Our first end of Season Raffle will be for a Newbie Lace Prize.  We’d like to reward those intrepid knitters who shared their very first forays into lace with all of us.  We had seventeen newbie lace knitters who posted either the start or finish of one of their first three lace objects.  Those seventeen Newbie lace knitters started 23 items between them, and finished over half of them.

WAY TO GO NEWBIES!!!

So… for our first Raffle, just for the Newbies, we have a Lace Knitting DVD from Meg Swansen and Tami at SchoolHouse Press

We’ve got 37 raffle "tickets" (each entrant got one entry for each object she cast on during the Season, and one for each object she finished, up to three of each per entrant).  I sorted the entries by the date of the qualifying post, and fired up my friend the Random Number Generator.  The winning numer is:  17.

And the winning knitter is Priscilla !

Congratulations Priscilla…. contact me with your snail mail address, and I’ll pop this right in the mail for you!

Meanwhile… we hope to run a Raffle every day or so until we run out of prizes.  But don’t worry, we’ve set aside the prizes for the Judged Competitions, and will announce those once the judges have made their rulings.

I finished my Diamond Latttice scarf this morning.  Sadly, I will not be able to post a fo picture.  My mom put the camera someplace safe and now has no idea where it is.  Here’s a random picture of it earlier…

Anyway, 350 yrds down, bringing me to a grand total of either…(FOs only)

694 + 350 +375 = 1419 yards if you don’t want to count the doubled yarn as two strands and

1388 +350+375 = 2113 yards if you do

I’ve had a great deal of fun this summer, and I’m really impressed with everyone’s projects.  And I think you guys may have addicted me to this lace thing!  If I find the camera, I’ll take blocking pictures.   The projects I’ve seen this summer have encouraged me to jump right in, and I still can’t get over the fact that I can knit lace!  Me!  The woman who hasn’t even gotten around to a sweater yet, can’t cable, and has never done colorwork!

Believe it or not, this shawl has less than 350 yards of luscious wool/silk yarn - details of which can be seen at my Ravelry link.

I couldn’t believe it knitted up so quickly!  I will be tackling another shawl some day.

I started these 7/15/08.  I’m realizing too late that I didn’t ever post a “Cast On” post for these projects.  But anyway, at least I’m getting them posted for “Finished Objects.”  And they just barely make it into the “Small lace knitting by size” category!

I actually LOVED working this pattern.  I even had to revise it just a bit to allow for more stitches around the leg, and 5 pattern repeats around the leg instead of only 4.  I may knit this pattern again some time when I can make a longer cuff.  Here’s my Ravelry link for more details.

I started this hat July 1st.  Here’s my Ravelry link for all the details and extra pictures.  It was definitely a learning experience, but I think I’ll probably actually wear it this Winter!  I call it my Himalaya hat because the yarn is Himalaya Yarn from Tibet!  And it has bits of bright colorful silk thrown in.  Makes me think of those Tibetan prayer flags.

 

The Meru Gale (Ravelry link) is finally finished!

I gave it to my mother and she graciously agreed to model it for me.

These are going to be my last finished project for this summer, the next socks are already on the needles, but in recognition of the weather getting colder they’re not lacy!
The pattern was Kaibashira Lace socks, knitted in Bonny (75% super wash wool and 25% nylon) from The Yarn Yard, this colourway was for May’s sock club, named Emerald.
They have pooled slightly oddly, I prefer one to the other, but that’s the joy of hand knitted socks, they co-ordinate, rather than match exactly!

My test knit is on hold as the pattern needs some altering and I decided to cast on a new project to keep my hands busy. I chose the Swallowtail shawl and decided to use the leftovers from Julias previous test knit. Here´s the beginning

And today…. I´ve run out of yarn and the shawl look like this:

Budding lace completed, lily of the valley completed, lacy edge completed, only the last scalloped edging to go (14 rows) and no yarn. Sigh. The good thing is that there´s more of this coming thanks to a generous prize doner here on SOL2008. The bad part is that it´s coming from the States so it´ll propably take up to 8 weeks until I get it. So this won´t be finished in time. sigh again. Well,  at least I tried. Maybe I should start yet another project?